I posted recently about the launch of Editorially, but I didn’t expand very much on my thoughts (the launch caught me by surprise). I have been using Editorially from almost the moment that they opened for beta testing. It’s a tool that I use daily, and in fact Editorially has its own icon on my iOS home screens. Kyle and I used it a ton in collaborating on Begin. James Martin and I use it to edit most long form articles on this site before I hit publish.
It’s a fantastic tool, so let me tell you why.
To understand why writers like Editorially so much you have to understand what, or how, “we” were getting work edited before. Pre-Editorially James and I were exchanging text files via email. I would send him the `.txt` file and he would send me the edited file back. I would then open TextMate or Kaleidoscope and diff the two files so I could see the changes.
There was no way, then, for me to post a blog article that had been edited from anything but my Mac, unless I wanted to fully accept all James’ changes. That was unsettling. Even though I accept all of his changes 90% of the time.
The only other alternative was Pages/Word with track changes, and I would rather shoot myself in the toe — it seems like that would hurt a lot.
Editorially eliminates the need for a lot of crappy tools. ((Kaledioscope is not crappy.)) I don’t usually write directly in Editorially, but once I have something ready to be seen by others, the rest of the work is done on the Editorially site.
### To the Future
I don’t know much about the future plans of Editorially, but I think it has massive potential. I would love to see some of these features added:
– Ability to have predefined teams. This way I can add a group of people to a document all at once instead of just one person at a time.
– The ability to publish from Editorially to different platforms. To export to Word documents and Pages files, or WordPress.
– The ability to archive old writings so that I don’t have to see them without deleting them.
– But most of all I want it to act more like a service — for example, the way Github does. Wouldn’t it be great if writing apps could integrate Editorially support like they do with Dropbox? You pull down the latest version and it is checked out until you are done editing — then it is pushed back up for others to edit and review changes. You could write in your favorite app, but have the full power of collaboration. In my mind that is where these tools need to be heading and I’d post with exclamation points upon this vision being realized.
### Concluding Characters
I like Editorially as it stands today, but it’s my optimism about Editorially’s future potential that keeps me coming back to the app.
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